John L. Work is a veteran of twenty years of Colorado law enforcement service and a graduate of Cal State Long Beach, B.A. and M.A. He has been a contributor and featured columnist for NewsRealBlog since January of 2010, and a guest columnist for FrontPageMagazine.

Today’s Los Angeles Times is featuring a report by Ned Parker that reveals the existence of a secret prison under the jurisdiction of Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki (L.A. Times photo above). Sunni Muslim prisoners and others there-in were allegedly tortured by beatings, electrical shocks, and anally raped. I am not surprised by this report. I have long believed that an invading Infidel army would never be able to broker a truce, ameliorate, assuage, mitigate, tranquilize, becalm, or otherwise call a halt to the centuries-old war between Shiite Muslims and Sunni Muslims over the lawful ascension to leadership of the Muslim Umma following Muhammad’s death in 632 A.D.

Al Maliki says that he did not know what was going on inside the prison, and that he has ordered the arrests of prison staff members. How that all will work out and how much of this report is true remain to be seen. The way I see this, we have traded one Sunni Muslim strongman, Saddam Hussein, for another Shiite Muslim strongman, Nuri al Maliki. And with the recent election results still up in the air, not to mention the negotiations that are ongoing in Iran about who is going to be declared the winner, Iraq remains at best a huge question-mark as to where the middle-eastern political situation is headed.

Hundreds of Sunni men disappeared for months into a secret Baghdad prison under the jurisdiction of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s military office, where many were routinely tortured until the country’s Human Rights Ministry gained access to the facility, Iraqi officials say.

The men were detained by the Iraqi army in October in sweeps targeting Sunni groups in Nineveh province, a stronghold of the group Al Qaeda in Iraq and other militants in the north. The provincial governor alleged at the time that ordinary citizens had been detained as well, often without a warrant.

Worried that courts would order the detainees’ release, security forces obtained a court order and transferred them to Baghdad, where they were held in isolation. Human rights officials learned of the facility in March from family members searching for missing relatives…

…The alleged brutal treatment of prisoners at the facility raised concerns that the country could drift back to its authoritarian past…”

“Authoritarian” – now, there’s a nice sanitary word for what is alleged. Yes – it’s all written as though Iraq has not already reverted to its past. We shall see where this one goes.

“…”More than 100 were tortured. There were a lot of marks on their bodies,” said an Iraqi official familiar with the inspections. “They beat people, they used electricity. They suffocated them with plastic bags, and different methods.”

An internal U.S. Embassy report quotes Salim as saying that prisoners had told her they were handcuffed for three to four hours at a time in stress positions or sodomized.

“One prisoner told her that he had been raped on a daily basis, another showed her his undergarments, which were entirely bloodstained,” the memo reads.,,”

Now, tell me if I’ve got this wrong. Weren’t our best and bravest troops sent in there, in part, to get rid of Saddam Hussein’s prisons, torture chambers and rape rooms? So, with Saddam gone, a new Iraqi Sharia-based Constitution in place, and our gradual troop withdrawal, what can we expect to happen when the Iraqis are left fully to their own devices? Or should I have used another word, rather than “devices”?